Perspective Shift:

1. Trauma isn’t the fire — it’s the smoke. Most people believe trauma causes their distress. But Keith reframes trauma as a signal pointing to deeper, pre-existing psychological defenses. The real “fire” is the wiring and adaptive strategy we were born with — trauma merely reveals where the defense isn’t working anymore. Healing isn’t about removing trauma; it’s about understanding what it was trying to protect.
2. You don’t grow despite your wiring — you grow through it. Many of us view traits like anxiety, fear, or shame as things to “fix.” But Keith emphasizes that we are each pre-wired with a temperament and defense structure. Growth begins when we accept who we are at the root, not bypass or reject it. You don’t heal by becoming someone else — you heal by becoming a more integrated version of who you already are.
3. Your autobiography is a living system — and you can rewrite it. Our sense of self is fundamentally a narrative process, not a fixed truth. Traumatic memories tend to freeze these stories in rigid, self-limiting patterns. But the narrative is plastic — we can reinterpret, update, and even transform our stories in light of new understanding. This narrative flexibility is key to post-traumatic growth.
4. Resilience and trauma are both forms of memory — and we build them differently. Trauma learning is a kind of sensitization memory — it makes us more reactive over time. Resilience learning is the opposite: it wires us to decrease our reactivity through successful adaptation. Recognizing both as trainable memory systems opens up new practices for rewiring our nervous systems toward strength and flexibility.